Henry Ford said, “if you ask customers what they want, they would say a faster horse.” Customers see the world through what they think is their problem and they seek people, ideas and content to help them understand ways to solve it. So if you are in a company today selling something new or different, or even something that has been around for 30 years, there is a very delicate balance that needs to be achieved between what you want to tell people and what they want to understand. Continue reading to see how marketers amplify the problem and how we want to achieve the balance between lines.

I recently read an indignant post on LinkedIn from an old school marketer bemoaning the idea that content marketing is a new thing. He was thumbing his nose at colleagues who suggested that content marketing is new, arguing that it has been around since the dawn of time, and was just a fancy new label for something marketers have always done. There were many hilarious responses to this post and it made me pause. Is content marketing an evolution or revolution?

We Canadians are amazing at developing products and services. Sadly, we are still quite behind in understanding how to market and sell them. So I pose this question to Canadian entrepreneurs: why isn’t good content on your agenda as the most fundamental business tactic for your company? Here is how Marketing CoPilot intends to take the first step in making B2B content marketing a gold standard for Canadian B2B companies.

What we learned at Content Marketing World 2015. It’s no coincidence that Joe Pulizzi holds Content Marketing World at the same time most students across North America are heading back to school. We have a whole series of blogs planned for the Marketing CoPilot audience over the next three months based on best practices and ideas that were shared at Content Marketing World, but the presentation with the most impact for us, that we feel needs to be shared right now is this: Why a content marketing strategy is so important and how to build one. Here are 3 tips we learned about content marketing strategy.

It’s cute sitting in meetings with CEOs who have an opinion about why their content marketing is or is not working. Few CEOs I speak with have any idea about what is happening with their Google Analytics data. Marcus Sheridan at the Sales Lion recently sent out a very short and compelling email to his readers that made me smile. Here’s what the email said: “Our opinions, frankly, don’t matter. Seriously, they don’t, at least for the most part when it comes to building a brand and business in the digital age”. We have come up with 3 data categories you must know before you start providing opinions.

Whom are you writing for? We discovered there are three very specific types of buyer personas who need content during the business-to-business sales process. The financial persona, sales persona and the technical persona. Each of these personas have very specific content needs during the sales process. And when properly understood, you can turn the teaching strategy of content marketing to your advantage to gain trust and support from each of these types of buyers.